Abstract

The dissertation examines the process by which Jesuit intellectuals legitimized the value of the New World for the Old World, by offering an imaginative way of understanding Spanish America. They achieved this legitimization by creating a literature of the marvelous and the fantastical that transformed the natural fauna and flora of the Americas into a spiritualized symbolic world and identified it with God's Earthly Paradise. With its vindication of nature, Jesuit scholarship and pedagogy in the New World also contributed to the construction of a Creole national identity. ;My work demonstrates how the presence of marvelous flora and fauna as well as wondrous beings is a convention tied to the theme of Terrestrial Paradise. There is, in fact, a strong tradition of Judeo-Christian roots that links the lands adjacent to Paradise to the presence of dangers, portents and mysteries. Thus, in the natural histories under study here Earthly Paradise is not only infused with mystery and marvel, but is also presumed to be surrounded by a monstrous fauna and a teratological anthropology. This study explores the attendant development in Jesuit thought of less empirical traditions such as Neoplatonism, contrasting with the Aristotelian Scholasticism found in more renowned natural histories, like that of Jose de Acosta. ;The texts that the dissertation examines, written by Jesuits and their disciples in Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese, include: Problemas y Secretos Marauillosos de las Indias by Juan de Cardenas; Historia Naturoe, Maxime Peregrinoe by the Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, along with his Curiosa y Oculta Filosofia ; El Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo by Antonio de Leon Pinelo; and Noticias Curiosas e Necessarias das Cousas do Brasil by the Jesuit Simao de Vasconcellos. ;My dissertation explores a rarely studied theme in a corpus of works. Neither the influence of biblical commentary and Jesuit historiography on natural history or how this influence contributed to a particular vision of American nature has received serious scholarly attention to date. My examination of this theme thus endeavors to extend and illuminate our understanding of the early modern vision of Spanish America